I now pronounce you Cute and Cuter, here’s some flowers.

Can you see all that texture? You see those purty colors? I tried out some painting media that I haven’t used before and I had a blast. The ocean and clouds are built up with a paste you add to your pigment to make dimensional paint. The rocks and sand use a similar medium, but the paste is filled with tiny glass beads to give it a crumbly sandy texture.

My friend Rachel asked me months ago if I’d paint a picture of the Oregon Coast with her and her partner’s names written in the sand, representing how they fell in love with each other on the romantic sands and rocks of Seaside. Shortly after she asked me, they got engaged; so my gift to them was obvious. It was also tons of fun, because I actually wrote their names in the “sand.” You couldn’t have asked for a more beautiful day on the coast for their wedding.

The super rainy stupid spring that we had destroyed a lot of our flowers. First the lilies, then the rhodies, and the roses. But here is a happy healthy hydrangea– of the variety that also functions as an acid-base indicator (three cheers for science!!). You can learn the specifics here, but the short story is I feed my hydrangeas coffee grounds to encourage blueness. From this picture you can tell what parts of the plant are accessible from below. The far side is where I could reach to mix in grounds to the soil. Two colors on one bush! Yay!